Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday May 12, 2014 @01:55PM
from the greased-lightning dept.

Mark.JUK (1222360) writes "Japanese mobile operator NTT DOCOMO has announced that they'll make use of Ericsson's advanced antenna technologies and radio base stations in order to conduct one of the world's first trials of a possible 5G based Mobile Broadband technology in Yokosuka (Japan), which aims to deliver downstream speeds of more than 10 Gigabits per second using the 15GHz radio spectrum frequency. But this is just one possible candidate for 5G connectivity and many organizations are still working to try and define an official standard, while most countries don't expect the first services to be deployed until around the year 2020."

There's plenty of areas where you can get both 3 and 4g wireless *and* drive stress free at 5PM... ride Amtrak sometime and look at what phones gets at each town the train stops in. Large towns have low buildings (thus the cell towers can reach farther) and with lower population density, there's less demand placed on those cell towers.

You do know that your phone's memory almost definitely can't process and buffer data that fast anyway, right? Decent smartphones can usually write to their flash memory at about 80MB/s. They can buffer to RAM faster but run out of their usually 1-2GB of DDR3 extremely quickly. So hooking it up to 10GBps seems pointless to me.

half the time it isn't because the content is in the cloud on oversubscribed serversvmware and any hypervisor will let you add instances that use more physical CPU/RAM resources than a physical server has. half my apps take a lot longer to update data than what my LTE phones should be running at. on verizon and AT&T

Not to mention all the time spent waiting for the 17 different CDN services to respond to download content, all the time spent waiting for the 23 different ad networks to respond to download content, all the time spent waiting for the various DNS servers to respond with the correct IPs, etc.

Sure, the actual downloads of the various bits of data is very fast. But that's the shortest/quickest part of loading a web page. And all the other bits and bobs and bottlenecks are the same, regardless of what speed of network connection you have.

Mobile data speeds are only available if you are the only active subscriber on that cell and you are standing right next to it. In practice you will see a small fraction of the speed, unless you are one of the lucky field testers using it before normal subscribers are allowed in.

10Gbps per cell should enable a stable 100Mbps connection in practice even at peak hour, and that would be very useful.

IANANE but I've heard that 5G isn't supposed to be about increased download rates since, as you say, there is little point. The point is as I understand rather increased capacity to allow a larger number of people to be able to utilize and reach the rate cap (~80 MB/s) simultaneously.

At Verizon's current sell rates for data, 10 Gbps downstream would cost around $12.50 per second. It would cost less for the first few gigs per month because they are selling plans with almost-reasonable per-gig costs now with their "2x more" campaign. So even on the charitable side, if they gave you 100 gigs (gigaBYTES) of data for $2 per gigabyte -- a price that is lower than anything any carrier currently offers aside from grandfathered unlimited plans -- you'd be burning $2.50 per second while downloading at full tilt. You'd exhaust your 100 GB pre-paid data chunk in 40 seconds.

Those of you who think there's no way they'd have the same cost per gigabyte in a 5G world, think again: the "overage" charge per gigabyte has been fixed at $10/GB for a very, very long time now, and it doesn't seem like it's going to change. The only way to get slightly lower per-GB costs is to buy a lot of data in advance, but even their highest tier plan is not "a lot", and it's still way too expensive to be practical for anything but light web surfing.

I have a bigger problem with the whole proxy business. I have a great fat LTE pipe to the internet that speedtests great 24/6 but in the middle is a proxy I can't get rid of that inserts 10 seconds of latency to respond every time the phone loads a webpage.

1.5GHz has a "hard time" penetrating walls, too, but that's still used quite effectively for cellular networks. Both will have no trouble at all with glass windows. And lower frequencies like 800MHz will probably remain as a lower-speed fall back in the event of window-less buildings and whatnot.

This sounds like more of a line-of-sight (antenna or directional dish) communication than mobile device.